News

Lecture on pyrogeography at unimont, Edolo (BS)

On October 17th, DavideAscoli researcher of PREVAIL project was at Università della Montagna of Edolo (BS) discussing about pyrogeography: a science which combines biogeography and fire ecology. The lecture focused on wildfires management in Italy and described 4 essential elements which are always valid for wildfires management in mediterranean regions: Fire should always be considered as a part of our ecosystems. It’s essential to invest in planning and prevention measures, which are more effective and cheaper than firefighting. Prevention measures should be integrated in economically auto sustainable productive activities. Wildfires prevention policies should always be integrated in rural development, agricultural and conservation ones. The streaming of the lecture is available here by Adobe Connect.

29 October 2019

WORKSHOP: “RURAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME & WILDFIRE PREVENTION MEASURES”

As part of PREVAIL project activities, an analysis of the financial resources invested in fire prevention, intended as direct forest measures (e.g. cleaning up of shrubs, firebreaks, silvicultural prevention interventions) and indirect measures aimed at the agricultural sector (e.g. reduction of fuel load by means of grazing), was carried out in the four participating Countries. The most important source of funding for such interventions is the Rural Development Program (RDP). PREVAIL has collected both quantitative data, including the amount of expenditure, and qualitative data in the four partner countries for the 2007-13 and 2014-20 programming periods. The results of the analysis will be presented as part of the Workshop “Rural Development Program & wildfire prevention measures” which will be organized in Rome on October 18th, 2019. Experts involved in the RDP planning, funds’ allocation process and the evaluation of effectiveness of the RDP measures are invited to attend and to actively participate to the workshop. The aim of the workshop is to collect useful information to make recommendations to improve efficiency of the provision of RDP funds for fire prevention in rural areas, both in the current and future RDP programs. To this aim the level of implementation of RDP measures relevant for the forest fires prevention and the main challenges (regulations, procedures, lack of information, etc.) in the planning-activation-implementation process of RDP measures in the Mediterranean countries will be discussed. Workshop Schedule

16 October 2019

First PREVAIL academic activities

The PREVAIL project has started its academic seminar activities with two events on the theme of fire prevention to increase preparedness to large fires. The first seminar was held at the University of Milano (Italy) the 16th of april 2019 with a class of young students in forest sciences. The second was held the 26th of may 2019 at the University of Bolzano (Italy) within the international course of protection forestry.

1 August 2019

Preliminary results of WP2 have been presented in Bordeaux

The preliminary results of the WP2 about the analysis on Rural Development Programs (RDPs) funds allocation to direct and indirect fire prevention have been presented in the seminar Networking to improve risk preparedness and mitigation(Bordeaux, 4th of June 2019), which was organized in the framework of the final conference of the INTERREG-SUDOE PLURIFOR project: Transnational Plans for the Management of Forest Risks. Several stakeholders involved in risk management from Spain, Portugal and France attended the meeting. This event allowed us to collect a first round of feedbacks from stakeholders on the usability of WP2 analysis.